Today in Digital Marketing - Are Instagram DMs coming to the Desktop? 🤞🏻

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Wednesday, October 9th, 2019. Happy Leaf Erickson Day. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, Instagram DMs on the desktop, finally! YouTube overtakes Netflix and the hearts and minds of teens. You can now book your YouTube campaigns months in advance. Big and welcome changes to the Facebook Messenger platform and third-party social media tools still do not negatively affect your reach.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Reverse engineer specialist Jane Wong has discovered that Instagram is working on letting you see and reply to direct messages on the desktop, like right on Instagram's website. Until now, agencies and brands really only had two options. Either use the recently released inbox on their Facebook page backend or worse, reply on their personal cell phone. Now that's great news for brands with a single account since they can just stay logged into the page. Not so great for agencies or multiple account brands. I suppose you could have all the brand's

Starting point is 00:01:00 pages open in a series of incognito windows. The real solution, of course, would be for Instagram to put DMs in their damned API, like comments are, or Facebook private messages. And then tools like Sprout Social or Buffer Reply or Agorapulse could service them just like any other comment. Maybe this is a sign they're working on it? Cross your fingers. If you're one of the many B2B brands that host a LinkedIn group, you may want to know that in a couple of weeks, LinkedIn plans to make a small change to how groups are presented. Quoting a LinkedIn announcement today,

Starting point is 00:01:36 if a group is listed, it can be found in search and will be visible on members' profiles. If a group is unlisted, it will not be found in search and will not be visible on members' profiles. Unlisted groups can still be discovered by sharing the group's URL. There will also now be a separate permission for inviting members. By default, members will be able to invite their first-degree connections to a group. If disabled, only admins will have this permission.

Starting point is 00:02:04 All requests to join the group will still require admin approval. File this one under, this didn't already happen ages ago? YouTube has now passed Netflix as the primary video watching platform for teens. So says Piper Jaffray's fall 2019 survey released this morning. 37% of teens surveyed are watching most often on YouTube. Netflix comes in at 35%. Maybe that's part of the reason Netflix's shares have fallen more than 27% in just the last three months. As for the other video sites, Hulu captured 7% market share among teens.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Amazon's Prime Video, 3%. And what of cable TV? It's still in there, a bit, at 12%. Working on a big campaign for the future? Now you will be able to book your YouTube ads well in advance. The platform's new Instant Reserve tool lets you make sure that you get in early on the inventory. Prior to it being online, brands had to connect with a YouTube ad rep to handle the booking. Forecasts call for YouTube to pull in more than $11 billion in global ad revenue this year. That's up 20% over last year.

Starting point is 00:03:22 One more time for the people in the back. Posting on social media using a third-party tool does not hurt your reach. This is an old myth that just keeps on coming around. This week, Agorapulse tested it again, this time just with Instagram, and found, nope, no difference. Post directly on the Instagram phone app, post through a third-party tool, doesn't matter. Same reach. Can we be done with this one now? Facebook has made some big improvements to its messenger platforms. For one, quoting Facebook this morning,

Starting point is 00:03:58 quote, private replies used to only allow plain text to be sent. With this update, businesses can send images, templates, and quick replies as part of messages sent in response to a post or comment on their page. Plus, apps will be able to dynamically change the persistent menu and the visibility of the composer, providing relevant menu options at different points in the customer's journey, unquote. For now, though, this is only open to developers and partners in the closed beta. Okay, lightning round. Pinterest has opened up a bunch of educational resources for marketers called Pinterest Academy. Courses include targeting and buying, creative strategy, and campaign objectives.

Starting point is 00:04:43 Snapchat was down for a big chunk of today, so don't worry, it wasn't just you. Ugh, God, Twitter. They had to put out an announcement yesterday saying, Hey, remember when you gave us your phone number for two-factor authentication? Yeah, funny story. We may have sold that to marketers for ads. Our bad. Also, we don't know how many people this happened to.

Starting point is 00:05:04 If your brand markets to young people and you want to see what your fellow kids are thinking about today, TikTok now has a daily trending page on its website. It's at TikTok.com slash trending. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by EngageQ. If you're listening to this on the web and have not yet subscribed, you will find direct one click links for your podcast app at todayindigital.com. Just click the button that says subscribe to the podcast. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on social. All my links are on todayindigital.com, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Are Instagram DMs coming to the Desktop? 🤞🏻

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